All,

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/697754...essen-horowitz

Coinbase just raised $25M to fund their growth from some of the most respected investors around.

Educated detractors are rare. I would love to hear more from these types, echo chamber are very dangerous.

Quick question:

I don't mean to interrupt the current discussion, but I want to give bitcoin to my brother for Christmas.

Say I give him 0.5 BTC on a paper wallet. What is his best play?

Like is there some sort of wallet where he doesn't have to put his name or identity on to be capable of using his bitcoin?

His the off the grid type and I'm only familiar with coinbase, so I'm curious about his options.

Thanks.

You basically are putting a private key on a piece of paper and possibly encrypting it. It also shows a public key so you can check on it. You send coins to the public address. He can validate it has coins. He cannot validate you don't have access to the private key, but if it's a gift, you probably won't steal from him.

No identity is needed. If he ever wants to cash it in, he'll have to use the internet to send it to someone.

Yes, pretty much any popular wallet lets you use it without a name or identity. Bitcoin-qt, multibit, armory, electrum, and blockchain.info all work and I believe all will let you import a private key from a paper wallet, although I've only done that on blockchain.info.

Can you or someone else, explain how color coin protocol works as simply as possible? I'm having a hard time grasping how outside assets like stocks, gold, real estate, other currencies are traded using colored coins

For existing assets, it's a bit trickier, and the practical application is harder. You need a way to prove you currently own something, or some initial distribution. An IPO might be a good example - you have anyone send bitcoins to an address for ownership. By sending, it proves you own a key. The IPO is a contract that is implicitly signed by sending coins.

Now you transfer ownership of the shares by basically transmitting data that can be meaningfully interpreted as a transfer of ownership. One way of doing that is through colored coins. In this instance, someone might create a colored coin for each piece of stock they offer. To do this, they send .001BTC for each share out of that address back to each address that sent 1 BTC. To transfer it to someone else, you write transactions in a way that sends that .001 BTC to someone else (and looking at the block chain, you can trace it back to the IPO). When it is time to pay dividends, you look at the current owners of the colored coins, and send proportional dividends to each one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmFjmvwPGKU

Thanks. Honestly still a little confused, but that helps.

Think of Bitcoin at its most fundamental level. It's a ledger that traces transactions back to an origin or set of origins. These origins exist by proof of work (mining). Every Bitcoin you get is basically a path that goes back to some coins that were mined. Each transaction is the definition of how to extend that path further.

To represent ownership of other items, you simply define an origin differently than a mined block, but an arbitrary transaction in time. You trace it's path as it goes down the chain to find the current owners. Except rather than just being "backed" by nothing at all, like Bitcoin, it would be backed by some physical good or ownership.

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

is hashing power for a given mining pool measured directly or inferred from looking at the % of the blocks they're adding?

if someone were to discover a weakness in the sha2 that makes them much more efficient at generating small hash values, we'd never know until they published it (or got too greedy), right?

Inferred from the number of blocks they create over a given time period and the difficulty, it's the only way to do it.

Even if someone who discovered such a vulnerability got greedy and 51%ed the network, I think most would assume it was just a lot of hardware running at once unless it was a truly obscene amount. That said, finding weaknesses in SHA2, even in theory, is extremely difficult and has never been done since 2001 despite rigorous review and testing. Any sort of catastrophic weakness that would facilitate a 51% attack like so is universally believed to be extremely unlikely.

i was thinking something like a weakness that lets me find matching hashes 1000x faster would be enough to let me print money like bernanke. mining 1% of the new coins with just the hardware i can fit in my apartment seems like a nice way to make an easy living (quietly) in perpetuity.

Just go back and read your old posts from the past year or so.

I swear I thought your change of heart was some sort of level. It's just stunning.

Would colored coins be good for bitcoin? Like do you have to buy bitcoin and use it/convert it to a colored coin? Or is a colored coin created separate from the 21 mil bitcoins?

Yeah, I was interested in the technology, just didn't see the pathway. I saw Mike Hearn's presentation on Smart Contracts and it got the ball rolling, I started researching more, going to meetups, learning a lot more about how things were being built on top, and then learned a lot. There's a few things I learned that I can't really share as well that have made me a bull with the price.

i was thinking something like as weakness that lets me rob banks 1000x saver would be enough to let me print money like bernanke. robbing 1% of the new dollars with just the hardware i can fit in my apartment seems like a nice way to make an easy living (quietly) in perpetuity.

You're completely missing the point, which is that we may never learn if someone were to improve upon the current method of generating small hash values in any way.

And with bitcoin's price going higher, all the smartest minds in the world have an incentive to try to find a weakness in sha2 and keep it to themselves. They don't need full collisions, either, just a way to get low hash values

If there was a way to generate low hashes more often, it wouldn't do anything since the difficulty would just increase. Unless you had some way to always get it, then all the coins would mint and we are down to TX fees and tons of blocks.

SHA-2 is around for 12years already, and used very widely.
So there was already plenty of incentive for smart minds to find shortcuts.

You are right in that such a shortcut would lead to a massiv edge and be mostly undiscovered.

The right analogy would be to worry about the fact that gold could be produced synthetically and someone would use that technique to get very rich would telling anyone.
From todays science standpoint both producing gold is (possible but insanely expensive) and finding a shortcut in SHA2 so far impossible.

Your suggestion will only cause panic among the noobs, and besides that has no value.

I remember you asking if it was ok to post about a project you were working on, and IIRC a mod ok'ed it, but I don't recall ever reading anything else about it. Did you ever post more about it?

Wall Street Will Put 'Hundreds of Millions' Into Bitcoin

you need to study the maths imo

I've been working on a bunch, but just set up a basic website for comedy downloads.

http://www.bitlaughs.com

Was gonna go back to it but been working on other stuff since. Right now making a blockchain analyzer.